I’ve followed my vast reading list and have forgotten how many years it has been–maybe two–since I’ve begun. Most of the novels have been hard to read because they were written at a time when the language was different, or they were translated from French or Russian or some other language.
I’ve made it to the writers with the last name that starts with H. One of those writers is Hemingway. I’ve read all of his novels, but I chose not to skip him for Henry James and opened A Moveable Feast for the first time since I was in my twenties. Some of the chapters came back to me, like the chapter when he visited a bookstore in France. It’s another novel that takes place in France. What is it about that country? I’ve never been there, but I plan to go before I die. He borrowed a bunch of books from the lady who owned the store, and he was in debt to her. She told him not to worry, to pay her when the time was right. I also remember the scenes with Gertrude Stein and a little about F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is the novel where Hemingway wrote his famous line about writing one true sentence. He also wrote that he would stop while he was ahead in the morning and never think about the story until the next day so his subconscious could figure it out. It sounded like a lot of superstition.
After reading many different writers and their styles, I wondered what made Hemingway influential. He would write a sentence such as “The wine was great.” Well, what was great about it? He would never expound.
I read too many books on writing in my years as an insecure writer. Most of those how-to books would point out how Hemingway’s sentence wouldn’t work, and I understood.
I’m in the middle of the book, and page after page, Hemingway mentions how something is beautiful or wonderful. Again, I wondered what was beautiful or wonderful about a person, place, or thing, just as if someone were to tell me.
In my twenties, a friend loaned me Stephen King’s On Writing.
“You gotta read this book if you’re a serious writer,” he said.
He got me excited, so I went home and read it.
In one chapter, King delved into a writer’s mechanics, namely grammar and style. I immersed myself in that chapter as if King would reveal a holy secret. He advised writers to write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs. The idea was new to me in the years I began to write stories. Pens explode. Jars salivate.
The same friend, a King fanatic, lent me another book. I think it was The Stand, a novel that was over a thousand pages. It intimidated me. How could I finish a book that long? How would it hold my attention? The paragraphs were littered with adjectives and adverbs. I had to put the book down and shoot it in the barn. Maybe he’d written The Stand and realized his errors before writing On Writing. Suppose he’d removed those adjectives and adverbs. The novel would’ve been fewer than five hundred pages, and maybe I would’ve finished the book. Even without them, his prose would’ve still been too golly-gee-whiz for me. I’ve noticed many of his stories took place in Maine, where I think he’s from. Is that how people act up there? I don’t know. All I knew was King wasn’t for me.
We need adjectives at times. If there was a hit-and-run, and a cop asked me (no, wait, no, that’s an offense these days), if a policeman asked me (no, that’s an offense, too), if a police officer asked me what the color of the car was, I would need to tell him it was green. But if I said the car was great, he wouldn’t have anything to go by.
But I still enjoy Hemingway’s style for how direct it is. It’s hardly flowery compared to something by Flaubert. I can’t get over how Ernest described certain people in real life, such as how he described Fitzgerald when he met him in a bar, I think, in France. It was somewhat critical. He painted Fitzgerald out to be a pretty weasel. Would that be appropriate these days? Writers used to get away with that degree of criticism, but I don’t know about it now.
